Politics and Literature - ENGL108

The relationship between politics and literature is never simple. Writers have always addressed political issues: supporting or resisting revolution, analysing the ethics of war or the sophistries of political language, interrogating ideas of power embedded in gender, class, ethnicity, industrialisation and sexuality. Literary language can make available subversive and powerful critiques of dominant political structures and hierarchies just as it can normalise inequality and stifle dissent. Poets and novelists participate in the dissemination of myths, stereotypes and narratives that privilege certain worldviews over others. Covering writing from the Renaissance to the present this unit addresses a series of political issues as they are constructed in literary texts, and looks at the aesthetic forms writers invent and deploy in order to reflect, produce and contain change.